Dr James A Bull

Summary

Dr James A Bull is a Reader in Synthetic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry.

Dr Bull’s research focuses on the development of efficient synthetic and catalytic methods to access novel structural motifs and heterocycles of interest in drug discovery.

Group News and OPPORTUNITIES

***New PhD studentship available in our group in collaboration with UCB: Phosphine Oxides as Rising Stars in Medicinal Chemistry. Details and applications here: https://imperial.ac.uk/chemical-biology/study/studentships-for-october-2024-entry/ ***

• See our work forming aminooxetanes through the defluorosulfonylation of oxetane sulfonyl fluorides: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-021-00856-2
•  For our latest work on heterocycle C-H functionalisation and the discovery of the DMAQ directing group.
• Our recent perspective on oxetanes in drug discovery in J. Med. Chem. 
•  For copper mediated C-H sulfonylation using a transient directing group
• For our latest work making enantioenriched sulfoximines using sulfonimidoyl fluorides which is featured in the Chem Comm 2022 Pioneering Investigators collection
• James is awarded the 2021 AstraZeneca Prize for Synthetic Chemistry, as covered in this Chemistry World article. 

For group news, see: @jamesabull and @jamesabull@mas.to

Biographical details

James Bull graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2001 with a First Class Honours MSci degree in Natural Sciences, Chemistry and the Raphael Prize for Organic Chemistry. He then spent a year working at GlaxoSmithKline Stevenage as a Research Scientist in the Medicinal Chemistry Department.

He returned to Cambridge in 2003 to undertake PhD research with Professor Steven V Ley. He completed the total synthesis of bisoxazole antifungal natural product bengazole A and analogues.

In 2007 he joined the group of Professor André B. Charette as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université de Montréal, Canada. Here he developed an intramolecular Simmons-Smith cyclopropanation reaction.

In 2009 he began independent research at Imperial College London as a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellow (2009-2011), working in the laboratories of Professor Alan Armstrong. From 2011 to 2015 Dr Bull held an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship on "Novel strategies to access chiral heterocycles as potential lead compounds in drug discovery". Dr Bull was then awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (2016-2023).

JB was awarded RSC/BMOS Young Investigator Award (2015), Eli Lilly OIDD Award for Outstanding Contribution to Compound Screening (2015), Thieme Chemistry Journal Award (2016), and the AstraZeneca Prize in Synthetic Chemistry (2021).

Publications

Journals

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